By Chana Ullman (Israel)

Dear IARPP community,

It is my pleasure to write to inform and update you about current developments and new projects in our organization.

We are looking forward to our next international conference in Sydney, May 25 through 28, co-chaired by Cathy Hicks (Australia) and Sarah Calvert (New Zealand). This promises to be a unique and challenging conference. Following four exciting pre-conference workshops, the opening plenary includes a traditional welcoming ceremony and an exploration of the indigenous culture of Australia, and the closing event includes a traditional farewell from New Zealand’s Maori participants. In between, we will explore the margins in our psychoanalytic therapeutic work, as well as in our contemporary sociopolitical life, and their dialectical tensions with the center and the mainstream. The many presentations, by well-known as well as new speakers, offer new and innovative ideas to enrich our relational sensibilities in theory and practice.

As is always the case at our international conferences, we will have presenters from many countries, but we are thrilled to host for the first time a number of presenters and participants from Asia. Thus, in the true spirit of IARPP, the conference will open the opportunity for multiple dialogues between the familiar and the new, with voices from the margins and from many contexts. We thank Cathy and Sarah and their excellent local teams for their creative and responsible hard work which will no doubt go on until the conference opens. Registration is now open on our website, and progressing quickly. We look forward to meeting many of you in Sydney.

Two new committees were recently established by the board of IARPP, moving us in new directions. The first is the Membership Committee co-chaired by Tony Bass (USA) and Sharon Ziv-Beiman (Israel). This committee is currently beginning to survey the needs of our membership, and to explore ways of reaching out to new communities where we have relatively few members. This will be an effort both to broaden our scope and help grow new important communities as well as to solidify ties with our current members.

The second committee, the Relational Voices committee, chaired by Susi Nebbiosi (Italy), has undertaken a new project of creating an archive of videotaped interviews and conversations with major relational thinkers around the world. We hope to include videos which already exist in various educational settings, as well as sponsor the creation of new interviews. These important materials will then be available on our website for viewing by our members only.

It is with mixed feelings of pleasure and sadness that the board has also agreed to re-start the project initiated by the late Muriel Dimen, to award interdisciplinary IARPP fellowships to leading non-clinician scholars interested in relational psychoanalysis. The Muriel Dimen Fellowship Committee is co-chaired by Francesca Colzani (Chile) and Roberto D’Angelo (Australia) and will announce guidelines for applications in the near future.

Last but not least, I am pleased to announce that Steven Kuchuck (USA) has been voted in as our President-elect. We all know Steven for his many contributions to IARPP as an organization, and to the relational perspective as an editor, writer, and speaker. Steven will begin his term as president in January of 2018, when my term ends. I wish to congratulate him on behalf of the board and look forward to our collaboration.

Warm regards to all,

Chana Ullman, PhD
IARPP President

Chana Ullman, PhD
17 Neve Matz
Rehovot 76100  Israel
email: chanaullman@gmail.com